squili asked Have you ever used BSD? If you have, what w…

I've used FreeBSD and OpenBSD. For around a year in 2013-ish, I daily drove OpenBSD until proprietary crapware I needed at the time mandated either a virtual machine or a Linux installation or a physical Windows installation, so I hopped back off. Those were comfy times. OpenBSD man pages are more or less what I aspire my writing to be: Clear, concise, yet readable. I still messed with OpenBSD occasionally and found several documentation issues, sent patches to tech@ until I got Theo'd on the mailing list and haven't been back since. I still check their code since more often than not, they have a reasonable idea (assuming you're like me and assume "reasonable idea" maps to "UNIX if the 90s never ended"). Unfortunately, they're very bone-headed with regards to their copyright policy (which I do respect) and with regards to how the world works (you can't really pull having no Bluetooth stack in 2023 unless you're doing a practical joke, but they stick with their ways).

FreeBSD is just Linux but several years later. The only innovations in recent times were taken from illumos/Solaris. Security posture seems practically absent for anything but directly exploitable issues; they took forever to put in ASLR, left the biased RC4 in arc4random(3), etc. Not a fan.

rq · 11mo

yes, but not for long. so no throughts on it

Puniko · 12mo

I did although I've stayed over musl / glibc based OSes

Chimmie Firefly · 12mo

I haven't, sorry babes.

Yaseen · 12mo

No, but I do wanna try it at some point. My first BSD might actually end up being pfSense or something along those lines...

astrid · 12mo

Nope

Ahri Boy · 12mo

i haven't

Jacky · 12mo

Nope. I was planning to try FreeBSD because I saw others use it and talk about it and it seemed interesting. But ultimately I don't have the time for trying out and playing with software I know almost certainly I won't use day to day, it's not really worth it

cheri · 12mo

I tried FreeBSD on my laptop a few years back. It was okay. But I had some issues with battery and wifi. The latter was especially bad because at the time I used GNOME, that basically requires network-manager, which is not a thing on FreeBSD. This was actually the reason I switched over to KDE. ^^
Maybe I'll revisit *BSD at some point.
I currently have a small storage server running FreeNAS, but I'm not sure that counts. ^^

Sigma · 12mo

I have not. IIRC I tried it in a VM once and it didn't boot, but in general I'm not really interested in tinkering with the OS and prefer to have something that works OOTB.

Besides, Flatpak doesn't work on BSD, and that alone is a dealbreaker since I would miss out on almost every GNOME app, while I work on a library all of those apps use. Then, I very much doubt trackpads work well on it + even support for my keyboard was only properly added to Linux kernel very recently so BSD likely doesn't support it. Not to mention tablets - and for, say, osu!lazer I need OpenTabletDriver which doesn't exist on BSD (as well as the game itself).

So overall it's one of the least practical options for me ^^

(I mentioned I'm not replying to tech questions here but already typed this one, so whatever)

squili · 10 answers · 12mo